Photo Friday: Obsolescence

This is what obsolescence looks like: a table full of VHS tapes.

We’re participating in the town-wide garage sales this weekend, and a big part of our sale is old VHS and audio cassette tapes. They’ve been sitting in storage beneath our stairs for a good two years now, and we don’t even have a VCR hooked up anywhere anymore, so it’s about time we try to move them. I do have a stereo in the garage with a cassette deck, but I never play the cassettes because I don’t have the patience for rewinding and fast forwarding, and I can connect my iPod touch to the same stereo.

So why piss around with analog magnetic media at all? On to digital it is.

Priced to move! Get 'em while they're hot!

I’ve discovered, too, that running a garage sale table is very much like running a convention table: people walk up, either sneer at your prices or your goods, and walk away. Sometimes you’ll get someone excited about a few titles, but then they’ll walk away without purchasing anything.

All I care about is moving the stuff so I don’t have to store it again.

Of course, part of the problem is I live in a conservative community and my tastes don’t exactly mesh with theirs. A number of them fawned over the Wife’s old copy of Anne of Green Gables, but then shrank away from Evil Dead and Reservoir Dogs as if they were on fire.

No matter. Tomorrow it’s the Wife’s problem as I’ll be at C2E2. It’s for the best anyway, as people were a lot more responsive to her because she could actually tell them about the romance novels she was selling. I would just grunt and say “You can save yourself a few hundred pages of Victorian boredom with this copy of From Dusk Til Dawn.”

She also won’t do things like:

Tell shoppers Se7en is a religious flick

Tell shoppers I Spit On Your Grave is about female empowerment

Swap that Legend of the Overfiend tape into the The Lion King box

Tell that old lady that her 8-year-old grandson will love those Anthrax tapes (hey, my kids do!)

Forget she’s sitting at a garage sale table and yell at drive-by browsers, asking “What the hell are you staring at?”

So yeah, she should have more luck than I did. With luck I’ll come home Sunday and she’ll have a fat wad of cash in hand, and I won’t have spent the same at C2E2.

About Mike Oliveri

Mike Oliveri is a writer, martial artist, cigar aficionado, motorcyclist, and family man, but not necessarily in that order. He is currently hard at work on the werewolf noir series The Pack for Evileye Books.

Share this:

No comments

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
Don’t get rid of the Star Wars tapes! Those are probably the only ways to see the films in their original form! I still have these and hope to convert them to digital files, someday. Sucks that my sons adore the newer, flashier trilogy to the originals.